Hello everyone! I have finally installed Mint on my laptop after using Ubuntu since ~2004. I have several years experience with using Linux, so I consider myself a novice. The first distro I used (if I remember correctly) was Mandrake Linux in 1998, then Corel, Red Hat, Gentoo, Ubuntu and now Mint. I chose Mint since it looks like a promising distro and I've heard a lot about it in the past several months. I tested it on a Live USB drive for a while and it was more stable than Ubuntu, IMO. I installed Mint 64-bit with Mate DE and it runs extremely fast for me. I will be making a donation to show my appreciation for the developers and those who have put in a lot of work to make this a very good distribution. Thanks everyone!

Thanks for the welcome! That should have been "but I still consider myself a novice." Linux seems to change so much and it's heading in the right direction. Some changes make it feel totally different. I think more people are now realizing its not the same os it was even 5-7 years ago.